Karen Elson steps into musical family foreground with ‘Ghost Who Walks’

Karen Elson picked up her guitar and stepped up to the microphone at Third Man Records in Nashville last week, staring out into a room packed with friends, Third Man fans and industry folks — most of whom had never heard more than a few minutes of her music.

Fortunately for her, playing music that no one’s ever heard is a pretty familiar feeling.

After a decade of keeping her songs to herself, the British-born musician, model and Middle Tennessee resident has just released her debut album, The Ghost Who Walks, in part via Third Man — the label owned by her husband and producer, world-famous rocker Jack White. White got Elson into the studio after hearing her play one of her songs at home, and it’s hard for her to say when the album would have been made without others’ persuasion.

“Just the idea of a model-slash-singer-slash-anything is such a clichéd thing,” Elson says. “There’s not much expected of models. I realized that if I was going to make a record, that I really had to do something that was genuine and that I put my whole heart and soul into. . . . I think if I had just put my voice to something and let everybody else do the work, I wouldn’t be proud of myself.”
Instead, Ghost is a very personal musical mix of southern gothic folk, vaudevillian ditties and classic country, hitting a sweet spot between White’s bombastic production style and Elson’s pitch-perfect coo.

Hearing this chemistry recorded, it’s not surprising to learn that Elson had no hang-ups about being produced by her husband.

“It’s everyday life at our house,” she says. “Jack’s always running in and out of the studio. He’s always working on various different projects. I’ve been in the studio with him before, singing backing vocals on other things he’s been working on. It was definitely more scary going into the studio and recording my songs, absolutely, but it wasn’t a tortured experience.”

Elson’s songs are strikingly traditional (“I have more of an affection for songs from 1970 backwards,” she explains) but also surprisingly dark. “He muffled her desperate cries under the moon,” she murmurs on the album’s title track.

As Elson explains it, at 31 she’s lived “a very full life,” growing up in a small industrial town in England, traveling the world as a model and eventually settling down in Middle Tennessee with a rock star for a husband.

“In general I feel like a very positive and hopeful woman, but at the same time, it still doesn’t mean that I haven’t lived a full life,” she says. “I’ve definitely felt melancholy in my life. I’ve definitely felt sad.”

Nashville, thankfully, hasn’t been the source of any sadness. Since moving here five years ago, Elson says that she’s happy to have “a community of really lovely friends.” She’s also gotten a good country music education, which is plain to see on twangy pop standouts such as “The Last Laugh.”

“Obviously, through Jack I’ve listened to a lot of Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell,” she says. “I have a real appreciation for those songs. They’re beautifully written, but also there’s such a strong narrative.”

The influence of Nashville’s climate — musical and otherwise — pops up most prominently on “Cruel Summer,” a fiddle and pedal steel-laden country waltz. Elson says she wrote the song with “a little bit of the Loretta Lynn fire in me.”

“I thought it would be interesting to write a song for tying in how wild it is in Nashville,” she says. “Last summer felt so turbulent. The storms were everywhere. I remember every morning I’d walk out into our garden and by the afternoon, there was always a massive thunderstorm. It just felt like an interesting metaphor to write a country song, to write a song about heartache.”

Still, Elson’s willing to pull herself away from the garden to put proper time into her musical career. She’ll be touring the U.S. and Canada this month with her band.

“I have two kids, so they’re always the most important thing, above and beyond anything else,” she says. “But at this very second, it definitely feels like most of my free time is being poured into music, and that’s kind of what it needs to be.”